The modern datacenter can often house hundreds of racks or cabinets containing thousands of servers, with changes often happening daily. Once installed equipment will often be required to be available 24/7 with little or no opportunity to power it down to change the configuration. Combine this with the ever-increasing power densities of the IT equipment, and it can represent an ever-present risk of thermal failure with very limited possibilities for remedial actions.

6SigmaFM enables the datacenter operator to test proposed configurations in order to predict outcomes, so minimising the risk of failure and indeed of getting into this difficult to manage scenario. In addition, a comprehensive change history – including environmental impact and performance – is stored so past decisions can be revisited to help refine the decision process and better predict the future.

Once your Virtual Facility (VF) is up and running, you can easily: drag-&-drop new equipment into every cabinet and fill it to capacity; add or change cabinets in the model; move floor grilles around; or model almost any other everyday operation you wish do in your datacenter.

6SigmaFM can help whether you have a DCIM tool in place or not. It's open structure allows for the importing and exporting of data to and from other 3rd party packages so you only have to update in one place.

- Use thermal simulations to reset cooling limits on cabinets as IT layout deviates from original
design loads.
- Export updated cooling limits back to IT asset management tools. o Modify layout of data-hall. o Add
or remove rows of racks and floor-tiles.

Design Upgrade

- Test effectiveness of proposed changes such as hot- or cold- aisle containment or cabinet-level
cooling before deployment.
- Test impact of new cable routes on airflow management before deployment.
- Consider changes to cooling strategies.
- Assess effects of different control strategies such as group control, control-on-supply or pressure
control.
- Test performance of a new ACU design such as EC fans in the floor void or variable-speed drives.

- Assess the impact of taking an ACU down for maintenance or simulate an ACU failure scenario.
- Identifying potential energy savings – for example, identify bypass air and ACU short-circuiting plus
test potential fixes before deployment.
- Periodically assess whether the facility is being overcooled and reconsider energy efficiency
measures that could be adopted.
- Test whether cooling set-points can be turned up to make cooling system more efficient without
compromising resilience.

Integrating Products

6SigmaFM integrates with other parts of the 6SigmaDCsuite to enable the simulation and assessment of various aspects of the facility before any changes are implemented:

6SigmaCooling – 6SigmaDC CFD solver for prediction of thermal conditions and airflow paths; 6SigmaRack – pre-test IT layout inside a cabinet; 6SigmaPower – power configuration and SPOF analysis; 6SigmaWeight – check loading on the raised floor; 6SigmaRoom – major design changes to the infrastructure of the facility; 6SigmaITM – (primarily for IT managers) view rooms being managed by 6SigmaFM to enable effective
separation of tasks and responsibilities and raise Change Requests (CRs) in order to service them.
Typical CR actions include:

- Adding and removing items from the Store Room;
- Installing, decommissioning or moving, equipment around a facility;
- Changing one item for another;
- General maintenance.

6SigmaDC is a program suite that will require different levels of hardware resource depending on the size and complexity of the models it is used to create and run.
For the sake of basic training and other small models (< 500sqft), it will run on a standard laptop with 1GB RAM and integrated graphics.
Any other modelling use is likely to require more powerful hardware.
The license server component, which can be installed separately on a remote machine, requires very little resource and should run on any supported Windows PC.
Supported Operating Systems. 32 and 64bit: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2003,Windows Server 2008, Windows HPC Server 2008.
Virtual machines are not recommended.